Overall Size A significant fraction of global private financial wealth -- by our estimates, at least $21 to $32 trillion as of 2010 -- has been invested virtually tax-free through the worlds still-expanding black hole of more than 80 "offshore" secrecy jurisdictions. We believe this range to be conservative, for reasons discussed below.

Remember: this is just financial wealth. A big share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks -- and many other things that count as non-financial wealth -- are also owned via offshore structures where it is impossible to identify the owners. These are outside the scope of this report.

On this scale, this "offshore economy" is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and -- most importantly -- to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of key "source" countries (that is, countries that have seen net unrecorded private capital outflows over time).